Stiller steers ‘Greenberg’ toward humanity

Something went wrong once for Roger Greenberg. Something big.

It happened years before, and its result is as plain as every bug-eyed twitch on Roger’s face. He’s a guy devoured by the terror of expectations. At 41, unlike his peers, he never learned to “embrace the life you never planned for.”

“Greenberg,” the latest writing-directing effort from Noah Baumbach, is another droll, sensitive essay in dysfunction, falling midway between his exquisite “The Squid and the Whale” and his woefully miscalculated “Margot at the Wedding.”

Ben Stiller leaves his silly side behind for this sometimes funny character study. His well-to-do brother (Chris Messina) gets Roger, who’s fresh out of a mental hospital, to housesit.

His life has been adrift, even though he doesn’t like to see it that way. “I’m doing nothing deliberately,” he insists.

But as lost, unambitious and sometimes rude as he is, his brother’s 25-year-old personal assistant sees something in him.

Florence, played with an open, downtrodden vulnerability by Greta Gerwig (“Baghead”), frets over the aimlessness of her own life but finds something touching in Greenberg – something even his long-suffering college pal (Rhys Ifans) and ex-girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who wrote the story this is based on) can’t see.

Baumbach overreaches, making the character a selfish, off-putting cultural and generational scold. But Stiller, in his most “real” performance in ages, finds the function in this catalog of dysfunctions, the humanity in this humanity-hating crank.